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earthstellar · 2 years

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Still going through the TFP Art Book!

There are some really dramatic/dark scene concepts/colour storyboards, hinting at how dark the show could have been if they had elected to take a more adult route.

1) Fowler being strung up and interrogated.

I actually really love the more realistic depiction of Fowler here, rather than sticking to his animation model.

It’s commonly noted that due to budget/technology/animation/etc. limitations, the human character models aren’t quite as good looking as the bots are, and I’m personally fine with that because I understand why it sort of had to be done that way.

Still, I can’t help but imagine how visually interesting it may have been to do an almost mixed-media approach, with the bots remaining essentially the same as how we see them in TFP’s animation already, but with human characters and environments being perhaps a little more realistic looking, hmm...

...If necessary, even going less 3D for the humans/environments might have been a really unique way to visually distinguish the bots from humanity and Earth, and make them stick out just enough to give a more alien, grand feeling to their presence.

Of course, I’m old enough to remember when 3D/computer animation was literally brand new, and there were a few shows (a few of which were on Liquid Television and the original iteration of the SciFi Channel animation block) that did this kind of 2D/3D blend owing to limited 3D capability etc. at the time, and I remember thinking it looked really, really cool.

(When Reboot came out, it blew everyone’s fucking minds. Hexidecimal was genuinely frightening. If I recall correctly, I believe that was the first fully 3D animated TV series? I could be wrong, though!)

I wonder if we don’t see things like that anymore, because modern/younger audiences might find it too jarring or possibly even distracting, as there’s no longer any strictly technological reason to have to do this type of animation style blending?

Either way, it’s fun to think about. I love the style used for these more serious concept illustrations.

2) Arcee being pushed back by enemy fire, mostly holding her own... For now.

Again, there’s a particularly dark/reddish hue to the background/scene here, and the camera angle/direction lends to heavy shadow and diminished overall lighting, which really emphasises a feeling of tension and danger or even dread.

What’s interesting is that in the Art Book, the image is described as “Arcee fighting Vehicons”, but it seems to me like she’s got a few human soldiers also firing from her side (possibly Unit-E members?), with the opposing forces looking to be humans (possibly MECH?).

I wonder if the image summary in the Art Book is either incorrect, or if there may have been a reason for what seems to me like a mis-caption! Weird; I’ll keep an eye out for anything else like this in the book which might be slightly mismatched between images/text.

I don’t currently recall any scene in TFP where Arcee is fighting with human soldiers against MECH in anything that resembles quite what’s depicted here, although of course there are some conflict scenes with MECH, so perhaps this was just one idea that got nixed as episode development continued onward from this stage.

I also think the more realistic style here works great, as with the Fowler example;

Nevada is a great environment to work with and can be made very sinister looking very easily (desert sands are orange, which can be skewed either brighter or darker in a natural-looking way to emphasise positive or negative mood in a given scene), and the heat cracking of concrete industrial flooring etc. which is fairly common in any consistently hot environment could help lend a nice broken-in, rough feeling to a given environment such as the MECH base, giving it an even more “evil” vibe.

It also really sells the difficulty being faced here, creating a more evidently threatening situation and increasing the sense that this is a hostile, dangerous encounter.

#tfp arcee #tfp fowler #agent fowler #tfp #maccadam #tfp art book #transformers prime #maccadams #tfp concept art

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ruthannanimation · 4 years

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Understanding Movies (Seventh Edition)

By Louis Giannetti ISBN 0-13-190836-7

1 - Photography pg.2

Realism and Formalism

“Three styles of film: realism, classicism, and formalism.” “Realism is a particular style, whereas physical reality is the source of all the raw materials of film, both realistic and formalistic.” In both realistic and formalistic films, certain details must be selected to emphasise; the element of selectivity isn’t as obvious in realistic films. Realism - trying to preserve the illusion that their film world is unmanipulated; an objective mirror of the real world. Style isn’t often noticed, more focus on what’s shown than how it is manipulated. Simplicity, spontaneity, and directness. Art that conceals art. A documentary image usually gets its emotional impact from it’s truth not beauty. Formalism - deliberate stylisation and distortion of raw materials. Expression of subjective experience of reality. “Expressionists are often concerned with spiritual and psychological truths, which they feel can be conveyed best by distorting the surface of the material world.” High degree of manipulation, re-forming reality. Avant-garde cinema, abstract. Form and content aren’t so clear-cut.

“One way of understnading better what a film is trying to say is to know how it is saying it.” André Bazin pg.7 Theory of organic form - the belief that form and content are mutually dependent in flm as well as any other kind of art.

“The way a story is told is part of that story. You can tell the same story badly or well; you can also tell it well enough or magnificently. It depends on who is telling the story.” Herman G. Weinberg pg.7

The Shots

Different cinematic shots are defined by the amount of subject matter that is included within the frame. In general, decided by how much of the human figure is visible. 1. The extreme long shot. 2. The long shot. 3. The full shot. 4. The medium shot. 5. The close-up. 6. The extreme close-up. 7. The deep focus shot (usually a variation of the long and extreme long shot.)

1. From a great distance. Almost always an exterior shot. Spatial frames or reference for closer shots - establishing shots. Often seen in epic films, where locale plays an important role. 2. Ranges correspond approximately to the distance between the audience and the stage in the live theatre. The closest range is the full shot, just barely includes the human body in full - head near the top of the frame and feet near the bottom. Charlie Chaplin favoured the full shot because best suited to pantomime yet close enough for face. 4. Figure from the knees or waist up. Useful for expostion scenes, carrying movement and dialogue. The two shot - two figures waist up. Three shot - three figures. More than three - tends to be a full shot. The over-the-shoulder shot usually contains two figures, one with part of their back to the camera, the other facing the camera. 5. Very little if any locale. Concentrates on a relectively small object - human face. Due to magnification, tends to elevate the importance. Symbolic significance. Extreme close up is a variation of this. Only a person’s eyes or mouth. 7. Consists of a number of focal distances and photographed in depth. Sometimes called a wide angle shot (uses wide angle lens). Objects at close, medium and long ranges simultaneously, all in sharp focus. Director can guide the eye from one distance to another. Close across to long.

The Angles

The angle is defined by the placement of the camera, not the subject photographed. This can act as commentary on the subject matter - the angle can represent the significance. In realism, extreme angles to tend to be avoided with most scenes being at eye level, roughly five to six feet off the ground; the way an observer might see the scene. Eye level shots aren’t usually dramatic because they tend to be the norm. The realist wants to make the audience forget the camera. “Formalist directors are not always concerned with the clearest image of an object, but with the image that best captures an object’s expressive essence.” Extreme angles involve distortion. This can be a source of symbolism in the imagery. The formalist calls attention to the presence of the camera.

There are five basic angles: 1. The bird’s-eye view. 2. The high angle. 3. The eye-level shot. 4. The low angle. 5. The oblique angle.

Generally speaking, the more extreme the angle, the more distracting and conspicuous it is in terms of subject matter.

1. Bird’s-eye view. Could be considered most disorienting. Photographing a scene from directly above. Unrecognisable and abstract because we rarely see from this angle. Hover above a scene like an all powerful god; the people photographed seem antlike and insignificant. 2. High angle shot. Less extreme. Camera is placed on a crane or a natural high promontory. Sense of general overview. Ground or floor is usually the background. Movement is slowed down; this angle isn’t ideal for depicting speed. Useful for suggesting tediousness. High angles reduce the importance of a subject. The importance of setting and environment is increased. Also effective for showing a characters self-contempt. 3.Eye-level shot. Lets the audience decide which characters are important. Puts the viewer at the same level, equality between characters, preventing them from being seen condescendingly or sentimentally. 4. Low angles have the opposite effect of high. Increase of height so useful for suggesting verticality. Increase a short actors height. Motion is speeded up and in scenes of violence particularly, creates a sense of confusion. Environment is minimised, sky or ceiling is often the only background. Psychologically increases the importance of a subject. Figure looms menacingly over the spectator, who is made to feel insecure and dominated. Low angles often used in films of propaganda and scenes showing heroism. 5. Oblique angle involves a lateral tilt of the camera. When the image is presented, the horizon is skewed. A man will look like he is about to fall to the side. This angle is sometimes used for point of view shots. eg. suggest imbalance of a drink. Psychologically suggest tension, transition, and impending movement. Natural horizontal and vertical lines are converted into unstable diagonals. Not often used as they can disorient a viewer. This sense of visual anxiety can be good for showing violence.

#BA2a #research #film language

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silviajburke · 7 years

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Geopolitics at Play in China

This post Geopolitics at Play in China appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

[Ed. Note: Jim Rickards’ latest New York Times bestseller, The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, learn how to score your free copy here. This vital book transcends geopolitics and media bias to prepare you for the next crisis in the ice-nine lockdown.]

China’s problems are not entirely external and are not limited to the new Trump administration. China is now embroiled in an internal political struggle around the efforts of President Xi to make himself the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. In reaction to the excesses of the Mao era — including the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which caused famine in the 1950s, and the destructive Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 — China developed a new model of collective leadership under Deng Xiaoping beginning in the 1980s. Deng himself was never president; he held a series of lesser posts. However, he was the architect of the current presidential system and was regarded as China’s “paramount leader” from 1978 to 1987. Deng held what the Chinese call the “Mandate of Heaven,” a quasi-religious concept that has bestowed legitimacy on Chinese emperors for over 3,000 years. The new model still had a single leader, but the leader was chosen by consensus among the Central Committee members of the Communist Party. Each leader was elected to a five-year term (in rigged elections), and was permitted to serve a second five-year term (some did so, some did not). Importantly, at the beginning of a leader’s second five-year term, he would designate one or two likely successors. Those designated successors would then jockey for position among the Central Committee members. Slowly a consensus would emerge around one figure. That individual would then be selected as president at the end of the current president’s second term. This system ran like clockwork through the presidential terms of Li Xiannian (1983–1988), Yang Shangkun (1988–1993), Jiang Zemin (1993–2003), Hu Jintao (2003–2013), and so far in the first term of Xi Jinping (2013–2018). President Xi’s first five-year term expires in March 2018. He is certain to be elected to a second term, but he has so far deviated from the script by not designating any potential successors for a smooth transition in 2023. At a minimum, this will make Xi more powerful after 2018 because it will eliminate the lame duck factor. Some observers fear that Xi’s real ambition is to capture a third-term running until 2028. This would be similar to Vladimir Putin’s gymnastics in Russia where he has used various means to hold power since 2000 and is expected to remain in power at least through 2020. Xi has also pursued an “anti-corruption campaign” that has conveniently resulted in the arrest of two of his most powerful rivals, Bo Xilai, the highly ambitious former mayor of Chongqing, and Zhou Yongkang, the head of China’s internal security apparatus. This pattern also mimics Putin’s Russia where corruption is tolerated as long as it is for personal enrichment, and does not transmute into geopolitics of political power. Those who aspire to power are brought down and arrested by the leadership. The question of whether Xi will disrupt the two-term system and seek a third term is open for now. Xi’s actions could provoke a backlash that will cause him to lose the Mandate of Heaven. At a minimum, the political uncertainty resulting from Xi’s moves makes policy responses to Trump’s provocations more difficult to predict. Policymakers are likely to make political rather than economic calculations in their decision-making. Economic policy optimization will suffer as a result. China also suffers from a host of internal contradictions to its global economic ambitions. Internet censorship, which I experienced first-hand during my recent visit, maintains Communist control in the short-run but stifles the creative exchange of ideas crucial to technological advances. (The internet was originally invented by the Pentagon not as a news or social media platform, but as a way for the best thinkers to exchange ideas quickly during our Cold War rivalry with Soviet scientists.) China’s one-child policy, beginning in the early 1980s, has led to two demographic disasters. The first is that growth in the working age population is now flat, which is a headwind for economic expansion. The second is that a cultural preference for male children has led to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide. This has created a gender skew of 20 million men in their twenties and thirties with no prospect for marriage. Through adverse selection by women, the unmarried men are the least attractive and least skilled. Many of these men are being forced into military service and sent overseas to supervise mines and industrial enterprises in Africa and South America. In any case, they are ripe for anti-social behaviors and a threat to social stability. This mix of adverse demographics, technological bottlenecks, and political intrigue are all detriments to China’s economic development under the best of circumstances. With new challenges thrown at China by the Trump administration, internal instability may act as a force multiplier to external pressure and lead to a breakdown of social order.

Geopolitics and Instability

The tensions with China around Trump’s policies on trade, tariffs, and currency manipulation are a sideshow compared to the much larger issue of Trump’s pivot to Russia.

From 1946 to 1989, geopolitics was fundamentally a matter of managing the Russia-U.S. condominium of world power and geopolitics. China was potentially powerful (as recognized by President Nixon in 1972), but was in fact weak, poor, isolated, and chaotic. Russia and the U.S. controlled the world. All other countries were either allies, satellites, proxies or irrelevant. Flashpoints erupted in Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, but U.S. and Soviet troops never fired on each other. The risks of escalation to nuclear war and the end of civilization were too great.

Since 1989, a tripartite world order has emerged involving Russia, China and the U.S. The strategic goal in a three-party game is to align with one of the other parties to the detriment of the third. The U.S. played this two-against-one game well from 1989 to 2009, but has failed utterly since then.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, coupled with the liberation of Eastern Europe, the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the emergence of a democracy in Russia, all resulted in close U.S.-Russia ties, to the point that U.S. “experts” designed much of Russia’s legal and financial infrastructure.

China was the odd-man-out in the aftermath of the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. I made my first journeys to Red China during this period, in 1992 and 1993. I met almost no Americans and was under constant surveillance by internal security service “minders” posing as mandatory guides.

It was during this odd-man-out stage that China executed its first maxi-devaluation. The USD/CNY cross-rate went from 5.7 to 8.7 almost overnight in 1994. It was also during this period that China perfected the manufacturing juggernaut and transportation networks that led to its export success, massive reserve accumulation, and unprecedented economic growth.

Jim Rickards on the Bund in Shanghai, China. From 1900 to 1940, the Bund was called the “Wall Street of Asia,” and was the center of trade and finance in China. After 1940, it was occupied by Japan, and after 1949 it fell under Communist control. Since the 1990s the Bund has experienced a revival and its neoclassical and art deco architecture have been restored. It is now occupied mostly by Chinese banks, hotels, and high-end shopping venues.

The game changed dramatically in 2000. The U.S. pivoted away from Russia toward China. The election of Vladimir Putin in 2000 involved an assertion of Russian nationalism including territorial claims in the Russian periphery of Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic Republics. Putin was reassembling the old Soviet Empire into a new Russian Empire.

Meanwhile, China manufacturing prowess and willingness to buy U.S. Treasury paper made it the ideal trading partner for the U.S. The Bush administration deftly embraced China and made Russia the odd-man-out. U.S.-Russian relations hit a low in August 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, a U.S. ally. Bush was too preoccupied with the global financial crisis and the War in Iraq to muster much of a response.

Beginning in 2009, the Obama administration failed to notice that Russia and China were playing their own version of the three-party game with the U.S. as the odd-man-out. Russian-Chinese cooperation expanded in initiatives such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the BRICS institutions, the New Silk Road initiative, and bilateral deals on currency swaps, oil and natural gas, pipeline infrastructure, and arms sales. (You can get an in depth analysis of the Russian angle in Nomi’s article.)

Obama was lulled into complacency by Chinese purchases of Treasury debt even as China’s currency manipulation, trade subsidies, and damage to U.S. manufacturing metastasized. By 2016, U.S. relations with Russia were at a post-Cold War low, while relations with China were on a downward trajectory. Russia and China had never been closer since the mid-1950s. The U.S. was the new loser in the three-party game.

With the rise of Donald Trump, the U.S. is back in the game, this time with the promise of much closer relations with Russia and confrontation with China. Putin seems willing to pursue this round with his new best friend Donald Trump. China is beginning to feel the chill of once again being the odd-man-out.

Russia and the U.S. are the two largest energy producers in the world. With cooperation from Saudi Arabia, they can dictate the global price of energy. The appointment of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, as Trump’s Secretary of State puts the use of the energy weapon in deft hands. China will be pressured for cooperation on issues such as the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear program, and Taiwan relations.

As is the case regarding concessions on trade and the currency, China is being asked to make concessions it cannot give. Beijing regards Taiwan as an integral part of China, a temporary “breakaway province,” not a separate political entity. China’s position on Taiwan is existential and non-negotiable.

China likewise has little room for concessions on its claim of near-complete control of the South China Sea. That arm of the Pacific Ocean is rich in fish that China needs to feed its people. China is unwilling to share the catch with Vietnam and the Philippines. Numerous boardings, collisions, and seizures have happened already. A greater armed confrontation there is just a matter of time.

China could help with regard to North Korea’s nuclear program. China has many transportation, banking, and food chokepoints it could use to stop North Korea’s bad behavior. The problem is China fears North Korea will retaliate by opening its border with China and allowing millions of desperate North Korean citizens to flood into China as destitute refugees. The result would be social and economic destabilization in Manchuria, a part of China already suffering from its rust belt status.

Given a revival of the Russian-U.S. condominium of power on friendly terms, and China’s inability to deliver concessions demanded by Trump, the prospect for U.S.-China geopolitical relations is poor.

This will only worsen the already deteriorating economic relations between the two largest economies in the world.

Thank you for reading the Daily Reckoning,

Jim Rickards for The Daily Reckoning

The post Geopolitics at Play in China appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

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